Deadlines, Conferences, and Other Disasters

How much distance separates a proposal from a paper? What makes a deadline easy to ignore? And why do so many writers major in procrastination?

Arts of the Working Class, a multi-lingual street journal that examines poverty and wealth, art and society, is a medium and a platform committed to creating sustainable connections between artists, academics, and institutions of all kinds with the most vulnerable members of society. They are also both a guest and a host at EASA Barcelona 2024—the biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. In anticipation of their workshop “Flipping the Coin(ed),” it was great fun to have had the opportunity to reflect on deadlines, conferences, and other disasters. Read my essay here.

Happy birthday, Caesar salad!

Today, on 4 July 2024, Caesar salad turns 100 years old. Well, kind of. Like the anchovies that make its dressing so much more than the sum of its parts, the stories about the origins of America’s most famous salad are slippery.

On the eve of this iconic salad’s birthday, the French newspaper Le Figaro interviewed me to find out more about the reporting I did for my 2019 article“The Surprising Truth About Caesar Salad” for BBC Travel.

Find the feature, penned by Alice Bosio, in the 3 July 2024 print edition of Le Figaro.

The Sparkling Queen of Rheinhessen

At the beginning of April, just as the first buds were about to poke out their heads and make promises about future blossoms, I travelled to Flonheim, Rheinhessen. There I interviewed Alanna LaGamba who, like me, is from Toronto, but, unlike me, is an impressive winemaker. It was a treat to meet her and learn more about how she accidentally moved to the countryside and started making wine, and even more so because the talented Vivi D’Angelo, together with her camera, joined us.

Many thanks to Pellicle for giving our conversation a home, which you can read here.

Codscapes and Culinary Knots

I’m delighted to have been invited to give a talk Monday 20 May by the “The Environmental Afterlives of the Suez Canal” research project based at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Karin Ahlberg, the project’s director, will generously serve as the discussant.

When a fish disappears, what happens to the chips that accompany it? How does the relationship between eating and ecology ebb and flow? And how do cuisines spark and, then, respond to environmental transformations? These questions set up my talk “Codscapes and Culinary Knots,”which will introduce the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group at the University of Augsburg.

Caviar with Chef Nobu

The chefs I’m used to chatting with don’t have Robert De Niro on speed dial. Nor do their names signify a global restaurant empire worth millions. And so when Highsnobiety invited me to interview celebrity sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa last month when he was the star at the Shibuya Crossing Party at the Mandarin Oriental Munich, I couldn’t say no.

Sure, I expected the kind of show-off ingredients that the well-heeled are suckers for—your caviar and champagne, your truffles and once-endangered bluefin tuna—but I didn’t anticipate to talk shop with Nobu about Greek salad and how size (and texture) matters when it comes to feta. Read about my Nobu night here.

Wine, Territory, and Indigenous Land

I may be a food cultural historian, but I have the ambition to moonlight as a wine writer and so I am thrilled for the opportunity to blend both by participating in my very first wine studies (!) workshop.

Hosted next week by the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, “Wine Place Space: Global Geographies of Wine Cultivation, Production, and Consumption” will discuss how global networks have swayed the spatial configurations of wine production in tandem with how such shifts shade how wine tangles with identities and imaginaries. My paper “Notes On Wine and Settler Colonialism, On Territory and Indigenous Land” will consider, on the one hand, how wine spreads selective ideas of culture and conquest and, on the other, how Indigenous wineries such as Nk’Mip Cellars have come to express long-standing relationships to their lands through a glass of pinot blanc or a bottle of merlot.

"A Cuisine and its Formulas" at the University of Gastronomic Sciences

As a food studies scholar, a trip to Pollenzo feels nothing short of a pilgrimage and so I am chuffed that next week I will tour there to teach a guest seminar in the Master in New Food Thinking program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

Titled “A Cuisine and its Formulas: Recipes, Time, and Culinary Ghosts,” the two day seminar attends to a recipe’s many lives—from a particular prescription to an open-ended provocation and from a historical archive to an artistic medium. The first day—“Beginnings and Endings”—addresses eating and ecology, the construction of culinary geography, and menus as narratives. And the second—“A Rose is a Rose is an Artichoke”—takes up culinary extinction, the discourses of substitutions, and cuisine as a creative practice. 

Minor (but many) menu complaints

A well-written menu, argues writer Anne Thériault, “can feel like a piece of literature in and of itself.” And part of the pleasure, she asserts, is the menu’s physicality—the weight of its paper and the texture of its grains, of requiring your eyes to scan rather than for your fingers to scroll. Another pleasure was chatting with her about menus as historical archives that remember and preserve dishes and meals from appetites past. Read her shrewd article “Please Don’t Make Me Use Another QR Code Restaurant Menu” in The Walrus.

To Steal a Fish

There is nothing I fancy more than returning to my favourite city in the world, and so to return next week for “Stories Come to Matter: Water, Food, and Other Entanglements” only doubles that delight.

Hosted by NICHE, the conference aims to enrich the discussion around the intricate interrelations between discourse and matter. Its goal is to highlight the values of stories and imagination and, in doing so, outline the vast network of agencies that dominate our material world. More specifically, it considers water and food as critical examples of how matters intertwine with meaning.

My presentation departs from Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel, Hot Milk, where the sun is always blazing. Sofia escorts her mother to Spain in search of a cure for paralysis. But the clinic also diagnoses Sofia's lack of courage and instructs her to steal a fish. At Almería’s market Sofia pokes the mouth of a monkfish and considers sardines and tuna before she slides a dorado into her basket. To steal a fish is the doctor’s prescription for acquiring boldness. Here she steals from the market, but what role does the sea itself—the water—play in this theft? What else might it mean to steal a fish and what worlds do fish story? In dialogue with my research about the intersections between cod and colonization, climate and crisis, "To Steal a Fish: Cod Tales and Colonial Knots" weaves together material, textual, and geographical fragments to tell global cod tales.

A Window, A Mountain, A Scape

This fall I had the pleasure of joining the Editorial Collective of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation. Published open-access, the journal champions articles that are as diverse and entangled as the subject of food itself, providing critical perspectives on the ways in which humans, vittles, and environments construct one another.

And it was another pleasure still to have penned the opening words for the journal’s latest issue: “A Window, A Mountain, A Scape.” Read my editorial here and the whole issue here.

Old Salt and Fresh Fish

Initiated last semester by the Environmental Science Centre and open to the public, the Green Hour spotlights current research in the environmental humanities by invited guests alongside scholars from the University of Augsburg. I am most look forward to opening this semester’s series of discussions next Thursday with my talk Old Salt and Fresh Fish: Introducing the Culinary Environmental Humanities.

Whether a main, a side, or even a snack, a dish narrates how appetites and environments entangle and clash. Considering how history seasons contemporary foodways, this talk introduces the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group at the University of Augsburg and its aim in advancing the “culinary environmental humanities.” Departing from the intersections between cod and colonization, climate and crisis, Old Salt and Fresh Fish will weave together slippery stories about the intimate relationship between eating and ecology to ask: How does a recipe trace the contours of local environments and, in contrast, how do culinary cultures draw beyond these borders?

Streams and Floods, Ripples and Flows

Next week the Institute of European Cultural History at the University of Augsburg is hosting the workshop Water Cultures and it is an honour that I will open the program with my lecture “Streams and Floods, Ripples and Flows: Towards a Bluer Humanities.”

What colour are the humanities? Or, perhaps, it is better to rephrase this question to highlight the possibilities of the plural rather than the rule of the singular. So, to try again, what colours are the humanities? The emergence of “the blue humanities” suggests that colour matters. John R. Gillis, for instance, argued that history has largely been a landlocked field. Scholars have traditionally started and ended their narratives on land, rendering the water and ice and slush and wetlands in between a “blue hole.” But blue only captures certain imaginations of water. What happens if you replace colour with wetness? How slippery are the humanities? How damp and how humid? In dialogue with these questions, “Streams and Floods, Ripples and Flows: Towards a Blue Humanities” will both think with and beyond colour to survey the emergence of the academic and creative discourse over the past two decades that places water and wetness—and their many forms—at the centre of its attention.

The question of water-related knowledge, attributions, communications and patterns of interpretation is at the centre of a cooperation between the universities of Amiens and Augsburg, with the participation of academics from Bayreuth and Abomey. The workshop in Augsburg is a continuation of a scholarly exchange that began in Amiens in May 2023. Find out more about the workshop and the rest of the program here.

Extinction, Endangerment, and Environmental Storytelling

What kind of narratives are mobilized when recounting, remembering, and highlighting extinction and the endangerment of nonhumans? Hosted by the Stavanger Art Museum and organized by the project “Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums” in cooperation with the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, this week I am looking forward to participating in the “Extinction, Endangerment, and Environmental Storytelling” Workshop.

Titled “Turtle Soup: The Ghost of Appetites Past,” my paper provides soup for thought by asking: How do appetites both cause and chart environmental loss? And what role do cuisines play in sharing stories about plants, animals, and the environment at large? Browse the rest of the program here.

Fish, Recipes, and Culinary Geography

How might a recipe double as a map? Beyond its list of ingredients and instructions, how does a recipe connect plants and animals and chart the lands and waters of the cuisine that it represents? In answer to this question, I am delighted to be giving a lecture next week as part of this year’s Towards an Atlas summer school at Università Iuav di Venezia in partnership with the NO-CITY network.

Titled “‘Making Fish’: Recipes and the Construction of Culinary Geography,” my talk will discuss how recipes and menus—their histories and literary lives—construct, represent, and even resist the specificities of place. How does a recipe follow ecological flows and, in contrast, how do culinary cultures draw well beyond the borders of their local maps? By sharing slippery stories about fish, it will weave together scholarship about tradition, authenticity, and cultural constructions of local food together with reflections on recipes, authorship, and the “culinary commons.”

Follow the students and their thinking and eating and living with across the Venetian lagoon here.

Best Before: Time and Other Ingredients

I am almost always late. Living a good chunk of my adult life in Germany—a country associated with punctuality—has not changed this. And yet there is one exception: I am always on time, if not early, for ballet class. Ballet, you see, sets a strict rhythm of exercises. Pliés open the class. The choreography might change week to week and yet the sequences of bends and stretches and jumps never does. Pliés gently welcome you to the barre and if my body misses them, then I might as well miss the whole class. So although I’m probably more comfortable than I should be challenging the collaboration between a clock’s hands and the social expectations they set, I do not dare disobey ballet’s schedule.

All of this is to say that I have been thinking about time: about how the body feels it and how the mind respects—or refuses—its measurements. And so it is with great excitement that I am returning to Oslo next week to take part in the “Lifetimes Conference.” The final event of the Lifetimes Research Project at the University of Oslo will bring together scholars who approach time as an analytical lens through which to study objects, events, and practices, entanglements, materiality, and futurity.

I’m excited to be part of the “Life cycles and death cycles” panel on Friday 11 August, where I will present the paper “Best Before: Time and Other Ingredients.” And I am most looking forward to being in the company of Ana Maria Delgado, who will speak about fermentation and the temporalities of microbial-based living material, alongside Camelia Dewan, Elisabeth Schober, and Johanna Markkula, who will address the life cycles of ships as both theory and method. Browse the whole program here.

No Strings Attached

As a cultural historian who studies food, you could say that cooking is part of my job. And yet I almost never don an apron. Why not? I have followed the apron’s cultural history to consider a couple of potential answers. More than just fabric, the apron—a seemingly inconspicuous garment—tells textile tales of labour, gender, and class. Tales I have written about for KWI Essen’s blog.

The KWI is an institution that researches, arguments, and reflects; it represents specific issues and ideas, and possibly even an intellectual style. And its blog is meant to increase its visibility and invite debates about its work. Read my contribution “No Strings Attached” here.

What to Eat in Times of Perpetual Crisis

Employing a range of media, including installation, performance, and video, the research-oriented practice of Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán addresses historical, social, and geopolitical narratives and their underlying power structures. Their recent work has focused on ecological issues and the overexploitation of natural resources as well as the overlaps between environmental concerns and military affairs. Fleshing out these themes, their first solo exhibition in Germany—Rehearsals for Peace—is now on view at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein.

In dialogue with their exhibition, I am delighted to host a workshop together with the artists on Thursday 29 June, titled “What to Eat in Times of Perpetual Crisis.” From British and US “victory gardens,” designed to protect against food shortages, to food rations in crisis areas to combat food insecurity: war and hunger are deeply entangled. In Europe, the term “wartime recipe” usually summons a bygone era and yet, with Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, it takes on new relevance today. How do crises such as war and extreme weather conditions determine what we eat? How do militarized landscapes and industrialized foods interrelate and overlap? And how does food link to violence—both fast and slow?

This workshop takes the form of a picnic and offers canned and collected foods in tandem with stories about landscapes and agricultural rituals, time and preservation, nature and war. Find out more and register here.

Eating Ecologies at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities

It is an absolute delight to share that I will be spending the next two weeks as a visiting researcher at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. I am most grateful for this opportunity to get to know and join this dynamic community of scholars and students.

As part of my stay, I will be giving a workshop as part of OSEH’s Miljøsalon. One part talk and one part picnic, which is to say that it will begin with thought and end with food, it will take place on Wednesday 31 May. I will present an overview of how my practice merges creative food studies methods with academic research and share a couple of snacks that narrate stories of extinction, ships, and time. Sign up to take part here and read more about my research stay at OSEH here.

Thinking with Urban Natures

For three years, the Urban Environments Initiative brought together researchers from across disciplines to share, question, and reflect on urban environmental issues. The latest issue of Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History, published by the White Horse Press, showcases some of knots and tangles of these reflections and the energy that only interdisciplinary thinking can produce.

This special issue, titled “Irritations and Unforeseen Consequences of the Urban: Debating Natures, Politics and Timescapes,” was edited by Eveline Dürr, Regine Keller, and Daniel Dumas.

Together with Raúl Acosta, Matthew Gandy, Maan Barua, Joseph Adeniran Adedeji, and Kara Schlichting, I ran toward the question of whether or not there is an urban nature and, in response, asked: What’s blue got to do with it? It has been a privilege to think and write in the company of such inspiring minds. Browse the collection of articles here.

Eating with the Trouble

As part of The Sustainable Development Festival in Rome, this Wednesday I am honoured to be participating in the “Food, Energy, Water, Migration Nexus and SDGS” round table alongside climate scientist Carlo Barbante, sustainability scientist Vienna Eleuteri, and climate change project expert Nawid Soofizada. I will present “Eating with the Trouble: Cuisine, Culture, and Climate, and the Future of Food.”

The round table will take place online. Find out more about the festival here and reserve a spot for the webinar here.